


when you wake up happy

by nicheinhischest



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 08:18:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1772131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicheinhischest/pseuds/nicheinhischest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think I loved you, back then," Isaac says, so quiet he can barely hear himself over the way his heart hammers out a beat. He tries not to look at Scott. Does anyway. "Think I still do."</p><p>(Isaac comes back to Beacon Hills on a Saturday.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	when you wake up happy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onpeakhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onpeakhill/gifts).



> Iiiiiiii... don't even know. I started writing this at like 6am because I got sad lol. I'm still sad (not as lol). But seriously. I wrote like 60% of this at the wee hours of the morning so sorry if it's just all over the place. I wanted to write a sort of "goodbye to canon Scisaac fic" and then this happened SO WELP.
> 
> Title comes from ["Guilt" by Hurts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tog065imuMA). There's a brief mention of alcohol abuse, but if anything else should be warned for let me know.

Isaac comes back to Beacon Hills on a Saturday.

He climbs throughs Scott's bedroom window the night he walks across a stage and gets handed a diploma; it's been almost a year and a half of radio silence on Isaac's end, but he's here now, without so much as a call or text or goddamn knock on the front door, because if he heard Scott's voice he might not have come at all.

Scott's sat up in bed, eyes flashing _redredred_ in the dark - and of course he’s awake, of course he already knows it’s Isaac.

He looks older. Which is stupid because like - he _is_ older. But he looks...filled out. Grown up. A little numb, too, maybe.

Jaw's still crooked as hell, though.

Isaac hits the carpet on soft feet, straightens up and stays where he is, waiting, lungs stuck on an inhale. Scott gets out of bed slowly, pulls back the covers and sits at the edge of his mattress for a moment, just watching.

There's a tattoo on his chest now, on his left pec. A triskele.

Guess Derek rubbed off on him a bit more than Isaac thought he would.

"I wanted to see you graduate," he says, and in the quiet of the night, he is far too loud. He shakes his head minutely. "My flight got in late. Sorry I couldn't make it -"

Scott moves, quicker than Isaac can follow, shoves him up against the wall next to the window and holds him in place. And the first thing he says, very first thing, is, “You made my mom cry, asshole.” 

(It’s not a _Fuck you_ and it’s not a _Stay away from me_ , though.)

"You never said goodbye," Scott adds, and when he laughs, it sounds more broken than anything else. "You were - you were _pack_ \- you were my family, dude, and you didn't fucking say goodbye."

Isaac ducks his head, but Scott grabs his wrist and tugs so he won't look away. "After the _funeral_ ," he says, and it comes out accusing. "Was that the plan the whole time? Everyone's distracted from _burying our friend_ and you and Chris slip out into the night -"

"There wasn't a plan, it just happened -"

" _I needed you_!" Scott tells him, voice rising, and Isaac looks at him, his eyes are so wide and bright, threatening to spill over. "I needed you, _Jesus_ , dude -"

"I told Kira," Isaac says, and Scott’s anger deflates almost immediately to confusion.

"I - what? ...Why?"

"She was looking for you, but you weren't there. Saw me getting into a cab to head to Argent's apartment. Saw my bag."

Scott blinks. "She never told me that."

"I asked her not to. Or," he scratches at his nape, looks down. "I asked her to hold off 'til I was gone, at least. Guess she just never thought it was an important enough secret to tell."

There's a wrinkle between Scott's brows. "Why did you tell her and _no one else_?"

Isaac lifts a shoulder. "I don't know."

Only he does.

Kira was probably the most unbiased, back then (maybe even now, still) because she didn’t share Stiles’ mostly-harmless antagonism, or Lydia’s general air of indifference since Isaac wasn’t Allison, and he wasn’t Stiles, and he wasn’t Scott. 

Because he had to tell _someone_ , at least, and Kira barely knew him. Didn't know what it'd be like to hate him for not being strong enough to stay.

"You didn't even leave a _number_ ," Scott's voice is shaking again. "Not even - I had to use an e-mail I wasn't sure worked still and you never even -"

He takes an uncontrollable breath in, choppy, and turns his back to Isaac to scrub his hands through his hair. He's in the middle of his room when he faces Isaac again, says, "I _loved_ her."

Isaac shuts his eyes. 

"Isaac, I loved her so much, even after - even when it was all over, even when we were over, but _I didn't leave_."

"I was," Isaac presses the heels of his palms to his eyes. "I was trying to get away from... From -"

"What!"

"The darkness," Isaac snaps. "Boyd and Erica. The twins. Allison. My childhood. Take your fucking pick, Scott. What was left here for me that wasn't broken in some way?"

"Me, I thought," Scott says. He's frowning. "We weren't a bad thing. We weren't always a bad thing."

"Weren't all that good though, either," Isaac says with a sigh. "You can't rewrite history, Scott."

"You can't erase yours," Scott fires back, striding forward. He aims a shove at Isaac’s shoulder. "You _can't_."

“I don’t,” Isaac makes an abortive gesture, tries to reach out before he changes his mind. “I don’t want to fight.”

“Should’ve thought about that before you went AWOL for a year and a half - ” Scott says, shoving again - but Isaac meets him halfway this time, yanks him in close between one breath and the next. 

Scott falls into the hug with a trembling exhale, fisting the back of Isaac’s jacket and twisting the fabric up in his hand and Isaac sags forward, tips his forehead against Scott’s, hand curling into a fist at his bare shoulder.

His heart is pounding like it has a point to prove (only around Scott does it beat like this, hard enough that it seems like it should be painful), and he _inhales_. He hasn't been bombarded by Scott's scent in months and months and he takes it in, greedily, knows Scott's doing the same, because the instinct runs deep no matter how far apart you’ve both been.

He hasn't taken a shower yet, still smells like diploma paper and the wax in his mom's lipstick, like weed and beer from graduation parties even though their preternatural metabolism tosses any chance of drunken nights out the fucking window -

(And Isaac’s tried before, he has: sat in cafés along the Seine, or holed up in the tiny flat Chris Argent lets him stay in; when Scott e-mailed him for the last time and sounded like he was finally giving in to Isaac's silence; when Allison had been gone for just long enough that she’d started to become a memory that only comes at random, a dull ache you learn to fight, dead in the ground for a year and a half and Isaac hadn’t done anything good with his life to somehow make up for it.)

Smells like _Stiles_ , too. Always like Stiles. 

And like himself: the generic bar soap Melissa buys, and cologne, and hair pomade; like relief and regret rolled into one.

Isaac's pretty sure that last bit is directed at him.

He chokes on it, thinks _I missed you_ , and then says it, because if he doesn’t do it now it might never come out, "I _missed_ you," and Scott makes a noise of distress, something low and dark and _hurt_ \- 

Isaac can hear the unsteady _barrumpbumpbump_ of his heartbeat that he hasn’t been allowed in forever. He drops a hand to Scott’s neck, cups his jaw with two fingers pressing in at his pulse point, and everything goes topsy-turvy when Scott kisses him, sharp, _painful_ -

And there was a time when Isaac would’ve killed for this.

(He walks them towards the bed, and Scott _lets_ him, yanks Isaac’s jacket off his shoulders until he can shrug out of it. 

He would kill for it now.

Would kill for the good parts, for a way to have Scott that won’t remind them of how it all got fucked up.

Because they _were_ happy once. They were. And he’d _kill for the good parts_ , for the parts they wouldn’t wreck just by being them - because when you’re young and in love and _monsters_ at that, mutually assured destruction isn't so much a warning as it is a promise.

Scott shoves him onto the bed, follows with the line of his body down, and it’s combative - antagonistic, almost; fingers digging into hips and bite marks buried in shoulders that Isaac hopes won’t heal so quickly, nothing but the sound of them breathing hard filling the room, and then they're naked and he's on his back, kissing Scott with too much teeth and not enough self-control to care, and it -

It hurts, a little, but maybe that's the point.

Like a catharsis in the form of Scott's mouth on his, on Scott's hand tight on his thigh, on the feeling of being filled up when he can’t remember the last time he wasn’t empty before this moment.

He’s leaving in the morning. Taking the first flight out of California to Charles de Gaulle, presumably with an ache in his bones that hasn’t gone away in a year and a half and a bruise on his hip that will hurt when he presses it against the arm of his airplane seat, his own brand of self-flagellation -

And he wants to cry, so he just kisses Scott instead.

*

He jerks awake at 6:27, before the sun and before Scott. Carefully extracts his limbs from where they were draped over the boy in this bed, and he’s dressed and headed out - down the stairs through the door, this time - before the clock on his phone ticks to 6:29. 

Isaac makes it onto the sidewalk when a car door slams, and he’s inundated with _familiarity_. 

Melissa is tucking her car keys into the pocket of her scrubs when she sees him. She freezes, a bundle of folders in her arms, an empty mug that smells of stale coffee hanging off a finger. Isaac wants to crawl into himself, wants to take off running so maybe she can pretend she just imagined it, imagined him -

“You’re here,” she says, and opens her mouth to say something else, swallows hard instead. “I - I need to - you’re _here_ , I - hold on, I just, I got off early from my shift I - dammit -” and she’s fumbling with her keys, getting her car open again to throw her things onto the driver’s seat while Isaac watches, stock still. 

Melissa takes timid steps forward. “ _Sweetheart_ ,” she says, and her voice breaks in the middle of the endearment. “Does Scott know you were here?”

Isaac nods. “I’m,” he clears his throat, can’t look her in the eye when he finishes, “I was leaving. Actually.”

“Back -” she hesitates, and won’t call it home. “Back to France?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Melissa says, and even in the dark, he can see her chin tremble. “Okay, that’s okay. You’re alright, though? Are you - um," she closes her hand into a fist, unfurls it to press her fingers to her mouth again. She's smiling, but Isaac doesn't think that it’s necessarily a good thing. "Are you okay? Are you safe?"

She takes a soft, gasping breath in, holds her hand over her heart like it's breaking. "Are you happy?"

"I don't know," Isaac says, after a moment's pause. He licks his lips, lifts his shoulders into an approximation of a shrug and pretends he _isn't_ trying not to cry. "No."

" _Mijo_ , I -" she says, and seems to simultaneously catch herself and stubbornly refuse to take the word back. "I'm -"

Melissa looks over his shoulder towards the front porch, distracted, and then back to Isaac. She comes in close then, stands on tiptoe to cup his face. 

"You can always come back. You hear me?" 

His gaze skitters away from the need to recoil but she _shakes_ him. "Hey. Listen to me: you have a home here. You had one and you have one. I don't care if it takes you another year or ten or a hundred to realize that, but you do. And you can always come back."

When Melissa smiles, this time, it doesn't look as pained as the last one. She touches his cheek, nods a little. She's still crying. "Okay?"

"Okay," he whispers.

She sniffs, drops her arms and brushes past him - turns quick on heel in his periphery, snaps an authoritative finger his way. "And you better leave a phone number this time, Isaac Lahey."

He laughs, and wipes his eyes. "Okay."

She goes inside; he still hasn't turned around, but he doesn't need to to know what she was looking at.

"Are you _trying_ to make leaving without saying goodbye a habit?"

Isaac shrugs again, stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and heads up the walkway to where Scott's sitting on the top step. "Disappointing people has always been my niche."

Scott laughs, says bitterly, "You're not as big of an asshole as you think you are, dude. Never have been."

He sits down next to Scott, side pressed up against side. "Not even when I first turned?"

Scott hooks his arms around his knees, and stares out into the night. "Maybe," he admits with a cracked smile that disappears as quick as it comes. "Still didn't want you to get hurt."

"Yeah, well." He traces a spiraled triskelion onto Scott's thigh. "Pain is inevitable. Couldn't stop it if you tried."

"I tried," Scott whispers, eyes focused on the swirling pattern the pads of Isaac's fingers keeps drawing out. "I tried really hard."

"You're Scott McCall. It's what you do."

Scott head thumps gently onto his shoulder, and they stay like that, silent, until the world slowly wakes up around them, until early morning sunlight starts to break through the dark.

Isaac's phone beeps. He pulls it out - it's the alarm, set for seven. He stares down at it; he has Scott's number in there, even though he's never once used it. He'll text him, this time, thinks _Fuck the international charges_ as the alarm falls silent, as Scott says, "You have to go."

"Flight's at eight. Forgot to call a cab."

"You're supposed to get there two hours ahead of time. You'll miss it."

"I'll be fine."

A pause, and then Scott blurts, "I hope you miss it."

Isaac snorts and squeezes his knee, pushes into a stand. His hands go back into his jacket pockets, and he heads down the steps and onto the walkway, turns when he's about halfway to the sidewalk.

"You know... “

Words catch in throat; Scott murmurs _What_. 

“I think,” Isaac starts carefully, “I think I loved you, back then.” He can barely hear himself over the way his heart hammers out a beat. He tries not to look at Scott. Does anyway. "Think I still do."

Scott has his arms around his bare middle, shivering even though they both run hot. Isaac nods; studies his shoes with a smile. "Anyway," he says, with one last half-hearted lift of his shoulder.

His steps off the curb when he hears, suddenly too close, "Isaac?"

He turns back around. "Yeah."

Scott's on the patch of grass in front of him, a hand balled into a fist at his side, his other arm slung across his middle to hold onto his elbow. He looks down, wiggles his toes in the grass. 

"Sometimes..." he takes an idle step forward, balanced on the curb. "Sometimes I think I loved you, too."

A palm touches Isaac's waist, featherlight, and then firmer, finds home at the small of his back. He cants his head, tracks Scott from his mouth to his eyes and back again. "Still do?"

"You're my beta." Scott shrugs. With him on the curb and Isaac on the street, they're nearly the same height. Scott still has to look up, though. Just a bit. "Always will."

Isaac shuffles in 'til his boots knock against the edge of the curb, settles his hands at Scott's neck, combs through the hair at his nape. Scott closes his eyes with a sigh, fingers wrapping around Isaac's wrists.

Isaac wants to say, _Maybe if things were different_ -

Only they aren't, so he doesn’t.

"Your mom's watching from her bedroom," he says instead, and Scott laughs shakily.

"Let her, dude," he says, and then softer: "Please come back."

"I will."

"Promise?"

He nods. "I promise, Scott."

And he kisses Scott then, and it still hurts, but in a different way than whatever last night was. Like saying goodbye to someone you love; like taking your time instead of seeing who can leave the most bruises. 

"If you don't come back," Scott tells him as they part, the words ghosting over Isaac's mouth, "I'll track you down myself."

Isaac laughs, even though nothing is funny. His palm is on Scott's cheek now and his eyes are still closed; he's sure Scott's are too.

"Promise?" he asks.

Against his hand, Scott nods.


End file.
